The present invention relates generally to pet food palatability enhancers and, more specifically, to pet food palatability enhancers, sometimes called palatants, including organic acids and which have antimicrobial efficacy.
The palatability of pet food depends on many factors such as the freshness of raw materials through the entire pet food manufacturing process including the application of a palatability enhancer. Palatability enhancers are made from a wide variety of ingredients providing improved palatability and aroma performance. The use of palatants offers consistent flavor performance to assist in providing consistent pet food consumption.
Palatability enhancers for low moisture pet foods include various surface coating compositions. Liquid or dry animal digest coatings are widely used to enhance palatability and are commonly applied either together with an enrobing fat for coating dry kibble or applied after the enrobing fat. It has become very common to include a pyrophosphate as a palatability enhancer in cat food diets. The palatability, nutritional benefit and healthfulness of pet foods can, of course, be adversely affected by spoilage caused by microbial growth. A palatability enhancer that has antimicrobial efficacy will thus provide multiple benefits to the pet food.